Can Houston sustain its generosity after Harvey?

How food helped the Harvey recovery: Part 5 of 5

Volunteers carry dry items from a home that was damaged by Harvey on Sunday, Oct. 1, 2017, in Houston.

Volunteers carry dry items from a home that was damaged by Harvey...

Editor's note: This is Part 5 of a five-part essay exploring the ways that Houston's food community rallied after Harvey. Read Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4 here.

Part 5

Houston's sprawling, grass-roots response to Harvey rescue, relief and recovery in many ways reflects both the scale of our geography — the greater Houston area is just a little smaller than the state of Massachusetts — and Houston's decentralized entrepreneurialism.

There's a danger of turning the later characteristic into a myth, which we sometimes do. It can become an excuse to ignore systematic problems like racism and poverty and to allow unchecked development that could make future flooding even worse.

Nevertheless, these ad hoc organizations that sprang from raw, chaotic empathy embraced that spirit and were nimble enough to step in and fill the many gaps left by larger, more bureaucratic institutions.

As Cat Nguyen said in an interview with Angry Asian Man, these groups "organically began to self-organize." Systems and basic rules developed not because edicts were issued from on high but out of a desire to operate more efficiently. Some of them were simple things, such as Dimitri Voutsinas taping "In" and "Do Not Enter" signs on the two swinging doors at the Midtown Kitchen Collective to help manage the constant flow of volunteers. Some were more complex, such as the creation of the I Have Food I Need Food website to help better manage food donations and requests for meals.

But none of this would have happened if peopled hadn't embraced chaotic altruism and decided to do the hard work needed to help others.

In an age of narcissistic reality shows and a constant emphasis on winning as our primary motivator, it's refreshing to see empathy motivate so many to help others. There are competing theories of human altruism — some based on evolution, some on neurobiology, some on social exchange, some on psychology. Many posit that ultimately there is a selfish reason for our desire to help.

But that does not match what I've watched over the last few weeks. Time and time again, people have helped strangers with no benefit to themselves. And do it day after day.

I'm sure that the camaraderie of a shared mission helped sustained their efforts. I know it helped me, along with the occasional guilt when I wasn't helping. So maybe there is some selfishness fueling our motivations, but in the end people were rescued, and people were fed. And there was something more — a compassion drawn from the chaos of the moment.

Going forward, we need to continue to embrace this chaotic compassion. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't work toward long-term practical and political solutions to the city's problems, but we should use that compassion to inform and motivate our actions. There have already been, understandably, many op-eds and articles about how to better manage Houston's next flood and constant development.

But very little has been written on how to sustain what many justifiably see as one of the core characteristics of Houstonians: our generosity.

Photo: Emily Jaschke

Volunteers at the Midtown Kitchen Collective prep donations for delivery.

Volunteers at the Midtown Kitchen Collective prep donations for...

Disasters like Harvey strip away our physiological and emotional defenses, force us to live in the present, staying acutely attuned to the needs of others. Monks and ascetics from various religions spend years attempting to attain and sustain the level of awareness that can be thrust upon us when a catastrophe strikes. But living at that level of mindfulness and chaos day after day may not be sustainable practically or emotionally.

As post-Harvey Houston has transitioned from relief to recovery, many of these pop-up organizations have passed the baton to professional nonprofits. Not because people stopped caring, but because most had to return to their regular jobs. Initially, their places of employment were closed, they took vacation days or they tried to do double duty by working and volunteering or running their business and organizing relief efforts.

In addition, these rogue relief efforts organized around fulfilling the immediate needs of people affected by Harvey. As the area moved into the recovery phase, some found themselves encountering the area's larger, long-term problems such as poverty, food deserts and infrastructure inequality — problems these ad hoc organizations weren't equipped to solve. Cleaning products, canned foods and hot meals were only necessary Band-Aids.

How we maintain the level of generosity we've seen post-Harvey, or at least some portion of it, is a question we need to ask ourselves individually and as a community. It's as important as questions about urban planning and flood control.

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There are some simple, practical steps that could be taken. Area businesses could for 2017 and 2018 (and beyond) grant employees personal service days in addition to their normal sick days and vacation. These days would then be used to volunteer at nonprofits throughout the area. Businesses could organize even more team volunteer days, especially during the work week, when nonprofits are often short on help. Businesses could combine two of Houston's most touted characteristics and engage in entrepreneurial compassion on a regular, ongoing basis, developing innovative ways to fundraise and staff long-term recovery and improvement efforts.

The irony that I have spent many paragraphs indulging in what Milosz calls "refinement of the mind" (which is being generous to my efforts) to describe and understand "simple acts of kindness" is not lost on me. In some ways, it is a selfish attempt to relive those acts. It's hard to move past the rawness, the openness and the sense of connection. And maybe that's an indication we shouldn't. Maybe being stuck in traffic, looking at downtown Houston, and listening to Robert Ellis's "The Lights from The Chemical Plant" while fighting back tears because you're thinking of both the suffering people are going through and the thousands of acts of kindness that you've witnessed or heard about is how we should be living our lives.

How we continue to stay in touch with this compassionate chaos on a personal level will be up to each of us. There will be no one solution. Philosophers, religions and cultures have been wrestling with this issue for centuries with varying results. It will take awareness and hard work as we settle into a new normal — there will be no getting back to normal as Midwestern farmers, post-9/11 New Yorkers, post-Katrina New Orleanians, and post-Ike Houstonians have all discovered.

But we will be able to shape that new normal. Since at least Katrina, Houstonians have been proving that the strands of generosity are already woven into the fabric of Houston, but now we have the opportunity to make that generosity the major feature of the city.

David Leftwich is the executive editor of Sugar & Rice, a Gulf Coast food and culture publication based in Houston. He is also the author of the poetry chapbook The City.